Those with large classical music collections are the ideal users of network-stored music and streaming solutions – so why are so many players still not serving us music as it should be played?

‘Mind the gap’ – it’s a monotonously familiar announcement on the London Underground, presumably soon to be delivered in multiple languages to save stumbles, twisted ankles or worse among the thousands of Olympic tourists due to descend on the capital over the next few months.

You see, trains and platforms were designed at different times during the near-150-year history of ‘the tube’, and so sometimes they don’t quite fit together, leaving that awkward gap to catch out the unwary. A bit like music and digital streaming systems, then – except the history is rather shorter.

It has a lot to do with the way home digital music storage has evolved – initial players were little pocket machines designed to hold a number of tracks for listening on the move – but as has been noted in these pages before, there are areas in which much of the specialist audio industry is failing those who want to stream classical music.

It’s not just about those awkward gaps between tracks when ripped or downloaded to digital storage, then played back on many a network hi-fi player – they’re not a problem when you are listening to pop songs which are separate tracks, but can play havoc with an operatic or symphonic work recorded as a number of tracks, with the music flowing straight through across the track breaks.

On many a player, you don’t get that smooth flow, but rather an awkward silence of a few seconds, sometimes in the middle of a phrase, making the work all but unlistenable.

Yes, in the old days of 78s one would have had to turn or change discs several times to get through one movement of a work, but in 2012 those gaps are something of a pain, not least because they don’t have to be there. After all, there are players able to go straight through a work, only observing the ‘natural breaks’ such as those between movements, and it isn’t a facility only available at the high end of the market.

Naim’s network players do it, as do Linn’s, and so do inexpensive solutions such as Logitech’s Squeezebox models, not to mention iPods and the like. Even online music streaming service Spotify now does gapless playback if you want – it’s enabled as a default in the latest versions of the software, but can be turned off if required.

That said, a large number of players out there are still unable to handle the gaps between tracks smoothly, as you may have gathered from some of the reviews in these pages in recent times.

Manufacturers tend to say it’s a problem they’ll address in future firmware upgrades, or in some cases adopt an expression of surprise and say no-one has ever raised the subject before.

That last point is surprising: as much as the problem afflicts classical music listeners, and we may be in the minority of buyers – though arguably not so when we’re talking about a network player with a four-figure price tag – so it also annoys those whose musical taste extends to ‘dance mix’ albums, in which a celebrity DJ combines many tracks into a seamless flow of music.

Or rather doesn’t, if each track is separate, and the player can’t handle gapless playback.

Whether it’s the St Matthew Passion or the Ministry of Sound, the problem’s the same.

So why are there gaps anyway? Well, it’s to do with the encoding of tracks, and the way the player handles them: if music uses an encoder to reduce the amount of data it occupies, then the player has to work out what encoding has been used, then set itself to decode the audio. And the ‘more encoded’ it is – ie the greater the data-reduction – then (to simplify greatly) the harder the decoder needs to work on the ‘reconstructive surgery’.

And of course many players still take the iTunes view that each track is a distinctive song, to be played separately, and can't entertain a world in which tracks may be designed to flow into each other as a single piece, while offering 'way points' to make long passages of music more easily navigable by the impatient.

Yes, there are ways around the problem – well, sort of: it's possible, for example, to specify in iTunes that an album is gapless: highlight the tracks in an album, right-click to 'Get Info', say 'Yes', you want to edit information for multiple items, choose 'Options', tick the box next to 'Gapless album' and choose 'Yes' on the pulldown, then 'OK'.

However, while this should give you gapless playback on iPods and the like, it still can't help with many third-party music streamers: the only way round the problem is to splice all the tracks you want to run together into one track, using a free audio-editing program such as Audacity.

Trouble is, you'll then be left with one long track – say an act of an opera – and it'll now be impossible to skip to sections of it as you could when it was made up from a number of tracks. It's a solution, but not exactly an ideal one.

So how can you minimise the problem? Well, for the reasons of compression and reconstruction mentioned above, you’re more likely to get gapless playback if your tracks are stored in a lossless form – either as FLAC or Apple Lossless – but there are other factors involved, such as the encoding software used to create the tracks in the first place, the media server software being used and so on. It’s frustratingly hit and miss, but the fact is that some players manage to play so seamlessly that their owners must wonder what all the fuss is about, so why can't they all?

The best assistance I can offer is that the audio reviews in Gramophone will continue to make it clear which products can – and can't – deliver gapless playback, something many other reviews overlook, and I'll keep on badgering those manufacturers whose products insert gaps about the importance of finding a solution as soon as possible.

By the way, it was mentioned earlier that the gapless problem isn’t the only one facing the classical music enthusiast with a taste for streaming – while we’re at it, can we get all the metadata stored when music is downloaded or ripped sorted out, please?

Surely we should be able to find stored music with a simple composer/work/performance or orchestra/conductor search, rather than having to remember in exactly which order the encoding decided to list the performers and then do the Sherlock Holmes bit to find the work I’m after.

Yes, it's possible to go into the metadata with an editing programme and adjust the labelling to get somewhere near my ideal, but life’s really too short, and that’s all a bit Heath Robinson in this swishy new world of music at our fingertips, isn’t it?

A mass of information about just about every recording is out there – can we please start using it?